How do you feel when a white woman looks at you and tightens the grip on her sling-bag, sure that all you have on your mind are her possessions? Like an African male, that’s how.
This, to be sure, is how many white people think of you: a crime about to happen. And that is how white ideology wants you to feel – like a criminal. If you do not programme yourself against such representations, you can get caught out.
But then, what do you feel when a brother rapes a white woman? And while we’re at it, what do you say when your neighbour’s son suddenly pitches up driving a Pajero and wants to sell your wife a leather sling-bag?
Do you think to yourself, ”none of my business”, or do you recycle some stupid sentiment about people only trying to survive and whites having robbed us blind for ages?
No, you don’t. This is your bloody business. When you don’t think beyond your self-interest, it may be your turn next time around. It may be your daughter or your wife next, and where will you turn to then? Do you really want it to get to the personal?
Rape and hijacking should make you angry. When you experience anger, you are close to feeling the pain of the ”victim”, you are sharing the responsibility for the kind of society we live in.
It is at this point that you start writing, ”I am sorry, Charlene Smith.”
And when someone asks why should you apologise as you didn’t rape the woman? Smith herself wrote, ”It’s wrong to think rape is about men exerting power over women.”
This is how you respond: the struggle for freedom impels me to make it my business. Rape is about power of one sort or another: heterosexual or racial or about class.
However, it is not simply Smith’s pain we empathise with. I felt the same way when I learned that my cousin was raped in her dorm room at Medunsa. She did not report the incident. She did not see how it would help.
I feel a similar kind of hurt when one too many of my friends is subjected to rape by the same people who you would believe should take joy in strong African women. I share my friends’ pain and their strength.
Without detracting from the pain of the rape survivor, this is one thing I and you, African men, must do: we must say to every woman in this country who is raped, we are hurting and we are angry, and we will work to stop it.
The first people who should make us mad are the rapists – of Smith, of Nomboniso Gasa, of friends and kin and so many women and children.
We are angry at any man who enacts his anger on others’ bodies; angry at a society that engenders and tolerates pervasive violence; at ourselves when we don’t get angry enough about rape because we believe it has nothing to do with us.
Rape is part of the larger structural violence. If only for that, it deserves our serious attention. Violence against any member of our society has everything to do with us.
If we do not oppose rapists and robbers, we may be sliding into believing that maybe some of our brothers are born bad and throwing our hands up in despair. Not to speak out against these crimes is to help the racist criminalisation of African manhood.
We should talk about this and hopefully fashion a humane future between us and women in this country. We should refuse to be part of a present that eroticises violence.
To talk thus would bring out some harsh truths perhaps. For instance, one might confess and say, ”I used to want to hurt white people real bad, where it hurts deepest. I wanted to rape white women.”
One might say, like many brothers, I got caught up in a perverted war game with white women as spoils. I didn’t give a second thought to African women. They weren’t going anywhere, I believed.
Hopefully, in that moment of truth-telling, one of us will recognise that all along we have been helping perpetuate the wretched situation of oppression of all these women. It was a lie that we wanted to do it to their females because white males have been raping black women and getting off scot- free for centuries.
But then a student in my department conducted a study and found white female students said, if it happens, they would prefer to be raped by a white male rather than a black male. They said being raped by black males is likely to be more violent, and with black males one is afraid of contracting HIV/Aids.
The group of students also said white males may feel they are doing black females a favour when they rape them, that this may not be viewed as rape.
It is at this point that we are called to do the kind of programming I referred to earlier: to think principle. It is hard, I know. But we can’t allow ourselves to say, ”Rape the white girl, cut her father’s throat”; not even to say, ”Hear what whites say; how can we share anything?”
As we did for the struggle, perhaps we should put into a chant that if the liberation project was meant to free us from oppression, it must have been to free us all from all kinds of oppression.
If the struggle was truly for liberation, it was for all kinds of liberation. When we are thinking clearly, it strikes us that liberation has no plural. Being an indivisible whole, liberation cannot be partitioned. It is radical. To opt for anything else is to endanger it.
Kopano Ratele lectures on the psychology of racism and gender in the psychology department at the University of the Western Cape